


Real Time

by Daisiestdaisy (Doyle)



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 11:18:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5125517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doyle/pseuds/Daisiestdaisy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Missing scene from 2.01. Gavin's given a thousand conference keynotes. This one should be nothing unusual.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Real Time

**Author's Note:**

> For the kink meme (http://siliconvalleykink.dreamwidth.org/1066.html) - the prompt was "how did Gavin find out Peter was dead?"

Patrice walks him through the logistics during the conference registration, while the tech journalists and bloggers who’ll make up his audience are lining up downstairs for press passes and mediocre coffee. “It’s all pretty standard. Cameras there and there, so you’re going to want to stay on the left of the stage – I know you think that’s your good side,” she says, stressing the ‘you’ in a way that makes it clear she’d never presume to favor one of Gavin’s sides over the other. “The Powerpoint’s ready to go. Oh, and one of the screens is going to be a tweet wall, but we can make them turn it off if...”

“That’s fine. Keep it on. I’m always eager to know what the people think.”

Gavin held out against Twitter walls for as long as he could. Partly that was because of the catastrophic failure of Hooli Byte. He still doesn’t get what went wrong there. People should have loved 200 characters 43% more than they love 140. That’s just math.

But more than that, it took him a while to come around to the idea of real-time live feedback; to the idea of any idiot with a keyboard feeling like they had a right to just weigh in on whatever carefully scripted, eminently wise thing he was saying on stage. At first he fell into the trap of responding to the virtual peanut gallery, which only ever seemed to trap them and him in some kind of troll feedback loop. Despite his legal team’s best efforts that video of his second TechCrunch talk, two hours after Richard’s victory, keeps surfacing on YouTube.

With practice, and following several franker-than-he-cared-for talks with his publicists, he’s gotten better. He covertly keeps an eye on the endless scroll of tweets behind him without openly responding to them. He takes them on board, gauges when he should slow down, smile more, look ‘less condescending’ whatever the fuck _that_ means.

Today, five minutes into his keynote, it’s working out great. Twitter is full of admiration for him, for his speech, for Nucleus –

Gavin doesn’t stop talking, and he doesn’t let irritation show on his face, but inside he’s seething as his name drops to only the number 2 trending topic in California. How the _fuck_ did Peter pull this off? The audience have noticed. At the tables closest to the stage people have started whispering to one another. People who weren’t already live-tweeting are pulling out their phones.

“...fully integrated into the Hooli platforms you already know and love,” he tries to go on, but there are people actually hurrying out of the room.

A long time later, when he can bring himself to watch the video, he realizes it happened a lot faster than he thought. He remembers standing there for whole silent minutes before Patrice took him by the arm and led him away. In the playback she mounts the stairs to the stage only ten or fifteen seconds after he cuts off in the middle of a word, turning his back on the audience to stare up at the screen.

It’s odd, watching it back, seeing his own expression turn from masked annoyance to open shock. It’s how he’s able to pinpoint the exact instant when he realized why Peter Gregory’s name was trending worldwide.


End file.
